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How much damage has lack of multiplayer and general IP incompetence caused?

I think SW failed because the asian theme had less appeal, and the leveldesign wasn't as good as in Duke. Also there were some unfair combat elements, the riot gun was very weak for example, and some enemies were way too tough or fast. In the second level you are already fighting with deadly red ninjas and coolies in tight areas. Not to mention the rippers later on. The shadow ninja appears in the first level.

Main reason why SW (and also Blood) failed was because it came too late. The Asian theme's less appeal contributed but it wasn't the main reason. If Duke3D had arrived in late 1997 instead of early-mid 1996, it most likely would have failed too.

Duke Nukem 3D came out 5 months before Quake, just in the nick of time to let its quality shine. The release of Quake for PC shooter games was an event like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. The other Build games that came out before Quake weren't good enough. (Witchhaven and Tekwar)

Blood and Shadow Warrior came out a year after Quake, they never stood a chance to hit it big, even though they were quality games. The rest of the Build games were simply retarded.

As for 3D Realms specifically, they should have a small team creating a couple of expansions for Duke3D while the main team made the jump to full 3D on the Quake engine with a new IP. It is almost impossible to create a Duke Nukem game on the Quake 1 or 2 engine, there isn't enough interactivity like in Build. The Quake games themselves are minimalistic, that's why it works for them.

Look at the games released on the Quake 1 and 2 engines, not very impressive:

You can't create an ambitious game on those engines. That's why the original incarnation of Half Life was scrapped and they modified the engine so much that it became a different engine, GoldSrc.

What I am saying is that there was no 3D engine that could replicate the Duke3D gameplay and effects that Build allowed. Unless you wanted to get a Duke game that would be the equivalent of what Blood 2 is to the original Blood.

I think SW failed because the asian theme had less appeal, and the leveldesign wasn't as good as in Duke. Also there were some unfair combat elements, the riot gun was very weak for example, and some enemies were way too tough or fast. In the second level you are already fighting with deadly red ninjas and coolies in tight areas. Not to mention the rippers later on. The shadow ninja appears in the first level.

Nonsense, SW "failed" because people didn't give it a chance. It looked dated, and people passed it over without playing it. Everyone I talked with who actually played it back in the day loves it.

That's why the original incarnation of Half Life was scrapped and they modified the engine so much that it became a different engine, GoldSrc.

This bullshit is borderline myth.

For one, if you look at the Half-Life Alpha, at what is actually in their in terms of technology, it's already "Gold SRC." Skeletal animation, 256 colors for each texture, Sound DSP, CD audio, scripted events, larger map size. Those are pretty much all the major changes that Valve made to the engine.

What changed from the time they decided to "restart" and what was released, was a focus on cleaning up level design, improving model quality, and coming up with a stronger, cleaner presentation. If they had released the game as they originally intended (with the needed bug fixes, changes to the main interface, getting all that final cosmetic shit done.) The technology would be more or less the same as what came out in Half-Life's retail release, but it would, artistically, not strike the right note.

"GoldSRC" is barely any different to Quake in any meaningful way. The changes are evolution, not revolution. What made Half-Life the mega-hit was the polish and atmospheric presentation that it offered.

Incidentally, everything I've seen indicates that Duke Nukem Forever circa 1998, had a number of those features in place. Skeletal animation, 256 colors per texture, sound DSP, and scripted events.

What's more important than all of this is ultimately what does this community need right now? To jump start it again?

Functioning multiplayer that is lightning fast, and with bugs to a minimum. (no desyncs, moderate mod support.)
Polymer needs to actually work right. No strange glitches, no performance hitches.
A major release built around these two points. A relaunch of the site, a recalling of as many of the old timers as possible. Get people excited.

Mostly it needs Gearbox to get off their asses, grow a brain, and DO SOMETHING WITH THE FUCKING IP.

You might disagree but I sense quite a bit of misguided entitlement here and I can't just sit idle.

So you basically created this to complain about Duke3D MP and bridged that to eduke32 not having MP.
And you're kind of implying here that it's the fault of eduke32 devs that there is no doom-like MP available and that further ties to your first post with a quite disrespectful "who is responsible for this disaster".

If it was that simple to get a stable MP, you'd have it a long time ago. It's not something that's being held back and devs have simply been procrastinating for years, focusing on other matters instead because they don't care. It takes a competent coder who knows the engine inside-out, and I really mean it. Duke/Build is a completely different beast to the Doom engine in terms of complexity. DOS Era p2p netcode does work but is quite trash honestly, with many limitations. It has to be rewritten. However you can still play oldmp, which does have a good implementation of it, but it does come with downsides due to the implementation. Still a lot of fun.

Trust me, the leads devs really really really want to have MP working and there has been a lot of stuff behind the scenes but it's really not that simple to implement.
You could do a "baby version" which cuts a lot of mechanics from the engine in order for MP to work but that's not duke anymore either, and people will soon ask why co-op or custom maps / mod X doesn't work etc.. Not really a solution and I'm sure you can agree there.
They are very aware of MP and how important it is but wanting and knowing these things is not enough. Thing is, getting someone competent who wants to touch the code is HARD. Even during Duke's prime time we had nobody really step up and do a proper implementation so it's not really any easier with a smaller pool of interested fans who can code.

I think it's very unfair to claim such things when the code is open and anyone is free to fork it and code their own implementation on the latest sources. Not to mention that we are still getting active support for a 10+ year old port by people who do this on their spare time.
I.e. Striker decided to take matters to his own hands with oldmp improvements (with h266's code as base) and try to do his best on getting MP up and running. It's quite playable and you should perhaps try it out.

Im not blaming eduke32 devs.. after all they work for free as a hobby as you pointed. Im mostly blaming whoever is responsible for the official releases (owners of IP). You can't ignore the fact that releasing Meltdown (which had MP, decent enough for some coop fun and MP with not too many players) then abandoning this all of a sudden and then releasing WT without MP and without the expansions is an absolute joke and a clusterfuck in a small community that only made it smaller.

If anything, the fact that eduke32 oldmp has decent MP and they cannot come up with something similar to have MP on Steam is even more fraglant. They are getting paid. If they don't want to work they could at least have paid eduke32 devs to use oldmp as a base for MP. I mean fuck even the MP in Meltdown would have been enough but they had to get rid of MP for WT? what a joke, fuck these guys.

You can't ignore the fact that releasing Meltdown (which had MP, decent enough for some coop fun and MP with not too many players) then abandoning this all of a sudden and then releasing WT without MP and without the expansions is an absolute joke and a clusterfuck in a small community that only made it smaller.

I guess you're talking about Megaton. Total Meltdown was the PS1 port. But yeah, I get your sentiment.

*snip*
And you're kind of implying here that it's the fault of eduke32 devs that there is no doom-like MP available and that further ties to your first post with a quite disrespectful "who is responsible for this disaster".
*snip*

Not making this point to attack anyone, as I know that there are reasons why the MP isn't working in EDuke, but any responsibility for this must fall to the devs, as they are the devs of this port, thus are responsible for the state of different portions of it. Again, that isn't to attack anyone for it not working, but just to clarify that 'blame' can't really be put anywhere else.

Having working MP would be amazing. I have tried the MP version and it works well enough to have fun with coop and deathmatch. To be popular, it really needs some kind of front-end for those who are a bit non-technical. For those who weren't around at the time, DM and Coop Duke were some of the most amazing experiences that you could have back in the day without removing your clothes.

The main problem with the IP was the lack of games coming out over the years. DNF took literally forever to come out and when it did, there were no modding tools. With no new content available, the whole thing died a year or two after release. Since then, Gearbox have sat on the IP with their thumbs up their arse. Reading around the web, there is still a lot of good will and nostalgia about Duke Nukem 3D, even after all these years. The fact that nobody is trying to capitalise on this - one of the most beloved FPS character in gaming history - is fecking barking mad.

During all the years that Duke has laid fallow, Doom, Sam and pretty much every other FPS character has had multiple outings, many with mod tools to keep the fan base kicking out new content, keeping the community alive, till the next instalment arrived. Every few years, you could be sure to walk past Game or Gamestop and there would be a new Doom, SS or other shooter game in the window. Ads appear on TV and in the gaming press, all of which keeps the IP fresh and alive in the hearts and minds of gamers and the public at large. Duke hasn't had any of this.

For the IP to really come back, and to entice a new modding community, we need a new game on a modern engine with modding tools. I don't think that fixing Polymer and adding MP to EDuke is going to woo people from Polycount to modding for Duke again.

It's not the eduke32 devs responsibility to maintain the popularity of the Duke franchise.

Multiplayer is broken in mainline eduke32, so people use eduke32-oldmp instead. Just like people use Zandronum instead of GZDoom to play Doom in multiplayer.

It's not their responsibility to do anything, that doesn't mean that something they do or don't do can't hurt the game's/IP's popularity.
oldmp is neat, but it's missing most of the improvements made to core ED32 for the past several years, such as TROR (which can do great things in multiplayer maps).

oldmp is literally a work around hack job to get some kind of multiplayer working. It is nothing like the Zanundrum situation, which is incredibly fast, easy-to-use and fairly modern. You drop and play, easy as pie. Nobody wants to sit there and fuck around with command line options and shit if they don't have to.

Being user friendly would go a long way to helping the health of the community. Nobody wants to hear that as it puts what is perceived as undue pressure on the Eduke32 development team, but that's not what it is at all. It is a simple statement of fact.

How many multiplayer mod concepts were simply abandoned because actually doing a fully functional multiplayer mod that wasn't held together with scotch tape was all but impossible? Quite a few. I remember some very ambitious ones from almost a decade ago now.

If you don't think multiplayer was important, just look at how booming Megaton Edition was before they took it off Steam. There were new usermaps going up constantly, and games going all the time. In that instance all it really took was a reasonable user interface to get people interested.

As to whether it's the Eduke32 development team's responsibility to keep the community alive or not... It is in the sense that Eduke32 is the only major port of the game still in development, and Duke4net is the only majorly active community related to the game left. It's an inherited responsibility. Does that mean they have to do anything? No. I mean, we can pack it in as a community if we're done I guess.

My hope is that when Ion Maiden is done and released all the improvements that were made to IM will get back ported to Eduke32, and then finally there will be a big break through with Eduke32. The kind that gives the community a shot in the arm.

My hope is that when Ion Maiden is done and released all the improvements that were made to IM will get back ported to Eduke32, and then finally there will be a big break through with Eduke32. The kind that gives the community a shot in the arm.

The Ion Maiden executable is eduke32. Theyíre one and the same thing. All improvements are already in eduke32. Maybe you got mixed up with Ion Maiden-specific improvements, which have nothing to do with Duke 3D.

Isnít there somebody working on the new eduke32 multiplayer? I hear itís very slow going, but it is being worked on...

I dont think pointing fingers at who's responsible for Duke not having client/server mp really matters. Also, the eduke team dont have to do anything for us, and we should be grateful for what we have.

With that said tho, the Duke community could be in a way better state if we had a mp on par with what the doom community have with ZDaemon/Zandronum. Oh man, all the nights playing CTF on ZDaemon, all the clan wars, all the 1v1 with your "online reputation" at risk... back in the day (like 5 or so years ago, not that long ago) i was playing Doom competitive all the time, it was the shit. That was for sure the main reason why i started to map for Doom.

I also played a lot of competitive Duke, but on Duke only 1v1 was a thing, because games with more players were not really that viable. I mean, you can play some 2x2, but once 1 person lags, everyone lags, and that can really fuck up competitive games. And lagging is obviously not the only problem. Having a huge list of servers in which you can simply join with the game going as well as not having to care about port forwarding for just that are also big pluses.

Now, would Duke be in a way better state if we had client/server around the same time Doom had? Of course, it would be silly to say the opposite. This may not be obvious for the people here that only have interest in mapping/modding and only play some coop once a year, but believe me, a good mp scene makes all the difference.

oldmp is literally a work around hack job to get some kind of multiplayer working. It is nothing like the Zanundrum situation, which is incredibly fast, easy-to-use and fairly modern. You drop and play, easy as pie. Nobody wants to sit there and fuck around with command line options and shit if they don't have to.

Being user friendly would go a long way to helping the health of the community. Nobody wants to hear that as it puts what is perceived as undue pressure on the Eduke32 development team, but that's not what it is at all. It is a simple statement of fact.

How many multiplayer mod concepts were simply abandoned because actually doing a fully functional multiplayer mod that wasn't held together with scotch tape was all but impossible? Quite a few. I remember some very ambitious ones from almost a decade ago now.

If you don't think multiplayer was important, just look at how booming Megaton Edition was before they took it off Steam. There were new usermaps going up constantly, and games going all the time. In that instance all it really took was a reasonable user interface to get people interested.

As to whether it's the Eduke32 development team's responsibility to keep the community alive or not... It is in the sense that Eduke32 is the only major port of the game still in development, and Duke4net is the only majorly active community related to the game left. It's an inherited responsibility. Does that mean they have to do anything? No. I mean, we can pack it in as a community if we're done I guess.

My hope is that when Ion Maiden is done and released all the improvements that were made to IM will get back ported to Eduke32, and then finally there will be a big break through with Eduke32. The kind that gives the community a shot in the arm.

I can't say I appreciate my work as of late being called a hack job, nor so much as a "workaround" as it is a stopgap until C/S is ready. Not to mention it's about as drop-and-play as you can get as far as Duke MP ports come with the help of the Discord Launcher I written for it (which comes included, btw). No need for the command line whatsoever. Something tells me you haven't checked OldMP out in the last several years, let alone the latest releases.

Also, if anyone wants someone to blame for Duke not having Client/Server netplay, blame Todd Replogle for the gargantuan, eldritch-horror mess of toothpicks, marshmallows, bubblegum, and spaghetti that the Duke codebase is. Seriously, if you sneeze at the son of a bitch the wrong way the entire game shits the bed. Trying to make C/S work in Duke3D is like trying to solve the lament configuration.

necroslut, on 15 November 2018 - 09:52 AM, said:

oldmp is neat, but it's missing most of the improvements made to core ED32 for the past several years, such as TROR (which can do great things in multiplayer maps).

You're right in that it is missing TROR, but I'm doing my best to try to get as much of the other stuff working as possible (Minus Polymer). At least, that's the end goal if C/S takes longer than expected.

While I think Eduke32 is good, I still believe it falls short compared to ZDoom, being user friendly is one of the most important things you want to have in your game, program or whatever you are releasing to the public, It's no wonder why Doom has a massive community compared to Duke3D, their tools, their source ports, they are all user friendly, even the scripting editor is user friendly, that isn't to say that Eduke32 is bad, but on some aspects it feels like a chore to work with sometimes, my main gripe would be the map editor itself, which while I think Mapster32 is a pretty powerful and good editor, sometimes it still feels like a chore and It doesn't help that its based on an "ancient" editor.

I don't hate Eduke32 nor Mapster32, I think the Eduke32 team has made some great things for the community, It's thanks to them that as of right now the community still floats, but if we want this community to grow, you need to attract people, and doing it with a not very user friendly program is not gonna help.

I think what holds Duke back is that it is harder to implement new art than it is with WADs.

To me Duke3D was the first shooter that went to realistic places and had fun in these places (i.e. not just a cinema, but a cinema with small gags and funny featues).

But most usermaps I have seen look so similar and often only use the same art ... and very often I think there should be more fun in the maps, As in: the funny things that were in the original game. It is not that these usermaps look or play badly ... but they lack new and intersting ideas i the small things to discover.

Yes, there are a few great TCs and some really great maps that feature the above. But they are few in a mass of usermaps.

EDIT:
Doom was more or less walking through corridors in space with demons attacking you. It is easy to top that.
In Duke you stepped to the St. Andreas Vault-sign and you get an earthquake, you walk to stippers and they jiggle around their boobies, enemies on toilets, and all the other numerous things that are in the game ... it is much harder to top that than top the corridors of Doom.

EDIT2:
The Alien World Tour-Episode goes in the right direction. Amsterdam for example looks fresh and new without the same art assets used over and over again in the last 20 years*. And the levels has a few gags on the whole weed-thing. But also there are many missed opportunities. For example: In real life the prostitutes open the door when you give them money ... so: Duke gives them money but no door to a secret area or even secret level opens. So, compared to the original game most usermaps (and here also the fifth episode) result in many little disappointments as opportunites were missed, which made me stop caring for DN3D-usemaps.

I disagree about EDuke32 being less user friendly than ZDoom. Open up GZDoom's settings and you're overwhelmed by different options, with little if any description of what they actually do.

We're not talking about menu options though. Doom, Quake, and others, have far superior multiplayer support. You hit the exe, and you go.

Striker, on 27 November 2018 - 02:48 PM, said:

I can't say I appreciate my work as of late being called a hack job, nor so much as a "workaround" as it is a stopgap until C/S is ready. Not to mention it's about as drop-and-play as you can get as far as Duke MP ports come with the help of the Discord Launcher I written for it (which comes included, btw). No need for the command line whatsoever. Something tells me you haven't checked OldMP out in the last several years, let alone the latest releases.

OldMP is a hack job, Striker. That was not, and never was intended as a slight against you. It is a literal hack. That's a certifiably fact. It's nowhere near the level of user-friendly to the end-user as say Zandronum or a modern front end piece of software. Not even close. "Hack job" is not being tossed at you as in "this is the work of a hack." This is said STRICTLY in the sense that the whole goddamn thing is a barely held together mess when compared to modern streamlined and user friendly ports that other games from that era have been graced with. If you think I am speaking ill of you or your work you are gravely mistaken.

Considering I spent years dealing with that version of Eduke32 before it even became known as "OldMP." I was the one who told Hendrick "this is the version I've come to find is the most stable. And he took it from there. I think I can speak pretty damn frankly about it. No matter what progress you've made, it's still the same jank-ass Duke3D netcode at heart, and it's still not up to snuff with Zandronum. The fact of the matter is the glitches, the desync, the crashes, the horrible lag, and the sometimes absolutely unpredictable behavior turned hundreds of people away over the course of many years. Vinny and I tried to get some fresh blood into trying it out through our setup with that version of Eduke and YANG. They found the entire process annoying and counter-intuitive. It drove them away from continuing to play the game. Focus was limited. A lot of mods didn't, and still do not work online.

It should be an all in one, intuitive user interface. Doom, Quake, Quake II, etc... All have ports with this capacity. You fire it up, go to the browser, and you're in. Simple. No other considerations, external programs, port finagling, front ends, et al required, and i'm not even getting into the massive issues that result when you start trying to run contemporary mods, because half of them won't load correctly at all. No spending twenty minutes trying to explain to a new player how to open a port in their router/firewall so that they can even play. You have no idea how many people that one just pissed people off.

Striker, on 27 November 2018 - 02:48 PM, said:

Also, if anyone wants someone to blame for Duke not having Client/Server netplay, blame Todd Replogle for the gargantuan, eldritch-horror mess of toothpicks, marshmallows, bubblegum, and spaghetti that the Duke codebase is. Seriously, if you sneeze at the son of a bitch the wrong way the entire game shits the bed. Trying to make C/S work in Duke3D is like trying to solve the lament configuration.

It's not about casting blame. I'm not blaming anyone for the mess that is the Duke3D netcode.

It was built in another time and with a different mindset. Nobody back then had any freaking idea that 22+ years later people would be contemplating rejuvenating multiplayer for a game they made. They were happy that it worked at all, at the time.

My core point was that if anyone has responsibility to it now, it's the people here and now. Those who are still actively working on Eduke32. Because they are all that is left. That's not me saying "Fuck you for not doing better." That is me saying "This is it, guys. Us. Here. In whatever way we can, contribute."

One of the nice things about the Doom community is that there are several different source ports, all with different aspects to them. People are working on tools and packs and all sorts of stuff. Doom Builder, one of the most easy to use Doom editors, has a nice windows gui, but apart from that, a lot of the WYSIWYG 3D features which everyone praises in Doom Builder were present in the BUILD editor since day one. The only drawback is that you have to learn the command line interface instead of having a noob-friendly windows GUI.

There are several different source ports in the Duke community, but only one that is used for modding. There was one attempt at making another editor and that's been your lot. Since the mid 2000's, everything has kind of died off except for EDuke32. This means that the entire future of Duke modding is in the hands of the small EDuke32 team. Expecting them to produce a whole new renderer (I'm not counting Polymer due to performance and other issues), new tools with a new interface and all the other bells and whistles that a much larger Doom community have come up with is not realistic.

Factor on top of that the absence of Duke in the mainstream gaming community and you have our current situation.

I don't know if it would be possible for the EDuke32 team to reach out to other programming communities and see if anyone wants to develop new tools or work on EDuke32 itself. Would Google Summer of Code be an option? Possibly looking at Build 2 for inspiration for the future?

I think what holds Duke back is that it is harder to implement new art than it is with WADs.

To me Duke3D was the first shooter that went to realistic places and had fun in these places (i.e. not just a cinema, but a cinema with small gags and funny featues).

But most usermaps I have seen look so similar and often only use the same art ... and very often I think there should be more fun in the maps, As in: the funny things that were in the original game. It is not that these usermaps look or play badly ... but they lack new and intersting ideas i the small things to discover.

Yes, there are a few great TCs and some really great maps that feature the above. But they are few in a mass of usermaps.

EDIT:
Doom was more or less walking through corridors in space with demons attacking you. It is easy to top that.
In Duke you stepped to the St. Andreas Vault-sign and you get an earthquake, you walk to stippers and they jiggle around their boobies, enemies on toilets, and all the other numerous things that are in the game ... it is much harder to top that than top the corridors of Doom.

EDIT2:
The Alien World Tour-Episode goes in the right direction. Amsterdam for example looks fresh and new without the same art assets used over and over again in the last 20 years*. And the levels has a few gags on the whole weed-thing. But also there are many missed opportunities. For example: In real life the prostitutes open the door when you give them money ... so: Duke gives them money but no door to a secret area or even secret level opens. So, compared to the original game most usermaps (and here also the fifth episode) result in many little disappointments as opportunites were missed, which made me stop caring for DN3D-usemaps.

Just MHO from what I have played, though.

*) AS said, I mainly blame the engine for that.

If you really think about it, 90% of the game's famous interactivity appeared in the first two levels. That include the hydrant with water, toilets, pool table, tipping babes. Most of the sector effectors, sector tags, door sounds, ambient sounds, sky textures, and in fact, monsters and weapons were introduced in the first 10 levels. After that comes very litle novelty, but some permutations of the existing assets with some new textures here and there. The only massive novelty appeared later are in Rabid Transit (metro) and It's Impossible (thunderstorm).

OldMP is a hack job, Striker. That was not, and never was intended as a slight against you. It is a literal hack. That's a certifiably fact.

You seem to misunderstand what a "hack" is. A hack is a gross ugly workaround to achieve something, slapped together with poor code/poor implementation. OldMP's netcode currently isn't that. Is it still the sync-based netcode? Yes. Hack? No. A mess? Not really, it's pretty straightforward once you know how it works, and is about the only thing that is compatible with how Duke3D does things internally without re-writing and refactoring a good 75% of the codebase if I had to estimate.

Also, about user-friendliness... *cough*DiscordLauncher.exe*cough* Simple as running Discord desktop and then the launcher. Can invite people in Discord chat into matches from there, the program handles everything.

Commando Nukem, on 28 November 2018 - 02:51 AM, said:

The fact of the matter is the glitches, the desync, the crashes, the horrible lag, and the sometimes absolutely unpredictable behavior turned hundreds of people away over the course of many years.

None of which happen in the current EDuke32-OldMP_Maintenance build. I've patched every crash I came across, the desync basically never happens unless someone does something fucking retarded like using different GRPs or CONs than everyone else. (I'm Canadian, and I'm able to play with a Russian, and like 6 chilean players in one game and it holds up for hours, even during massive lagspikes.) As for the latency, it's manageable now. Mind you, it'll never be as good as a proper C/S implementation with dedicated servers and in-game joining, but it's the closest you'll get for now.

Commando Nukem, on 28 November 2018 - 02:51 AM, said:

Doom, Quake, Quake II, etc... port finagling...

Every single one of those games you mentioned absolutely requires "port finagling"... aka, opening your ports. If your ports aren't open, you can't host games. You can join, but you can't host. Same situation with OldMP, in master/slave, you need to open your ports to host, but you don't need to do so if you're joining someone else.

Commando Nukem, on 28 November 2018 - 02:51 AM, said:

My core point was that if anyone has responsibility to it now, it's the people here and now. Those who are still actively working on Eduke32. Because they are all that is left. That's not me saying "Fuck you for not doing better." That is me saying "This is it, guys. Us. Here. In whatever way we can, contribute."

Then hop to it. Download the source code from the SVN, along with Visual Studio 2017 if you don't have it, and get crackin'. This goes for anyone with C++ experience, who wants to see things get done faster. Need all the help we can get, but there's more complaining than doing something about it from what I've seen so far. If those who play Zan or GZDoom want something done, they make a patch/pull request. Here? It's usually bitching, or someone makes an experimental fork that'll never get finished (like PolymerNG), or falls outside of the scope of what EDuke32 is and what it needs or is a complete mess and rightfully gets rejected.

Everyone seems to forget, EDuke32 doesn't have nearly as much manpower behind it as the likes of GZDoom. (It's like 9 devs and occasional contributors combined vs the 20 or more that GZDoom has, thanks to all of those aforementioned patches.)

Either way, polymost performance improvements (makes use of shaders similar to polymer's artmapping for tile shades now, for example), refactors to various pieces of the game logic, and whatnot are the main focus of EDuke32 as far as I'm aware at the moment. Ie. Getting things cleaned up/lined up so things run smoothly and stuff like proper C/S netcode may actually be possible to approach in the near future.

I am willing to contribute. I am a C#, Python, Numpy, Julia, SQL programmer. I dont know C++ but I could learn.

However I have some specific ideas I would like to tackle. Happy to share if someone (striker) PMs me.

You'll have to talk to TerminX or Hendricks266. I don't have any say, I just contribute patches. Your C# knowledge would probably be what carries the most over to C++, it's probably the closest. Still quite different in many respects though.

Stiker said: "Everyone seems to forget, EDuke32 doesn't have nearly as much manpower behind it as the likes of GZDoom. (It's like 9 devs and occasional contributors combined vs the 20 or more that GZDoom has, thanks to all of those aforementioned patches.)"